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Comment by BillinghamJ | Hacker News Reader

> I feel that you shouldn't start with microservices unless you have reasonable experience of building a microservices system in the team

Well, yeah... obviously. That's not the same thing as it being bad to start with microservices generally.

I just don't agree with this at all. The designer of the architecture clearly does need to know how to design service-based architectures and needs to have a very strong understanding of the business domain to draw reasonable initial boundaries. These are not unusual traits when starting a company as a technical founder.

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What if those boundaries change because an initial assumption turns out to be wrong?

In a monolith, no biggy. With microservices, huge pain.

Moving to microservices is something you do to optimise scability, but it comes with costs. A major cost is the reduction in flexibility. Starting a new not-very-well-understood thing needs massive flexibility.

I think we've found in many situations that the microservice boundaries make it easier to change things. We were pretty careful in making fairly conservative choices initially though, and split some of the bigger systems up more over time.

> These are not unusual traits when starting a company as a technical founder.

Its actually not unusual to have technical cofounders who have no prior software engineering work experience.

I see two categories of technical founders.

1. The people who have many years of experience building a highly specialized application using domain knowledge gained at their previous job.

2. The new CS grad right out of college who had big dreams, a lot of time, and high risk tolerance. Unclear as to whether they're starting up the company because they failed to get a job elsewhere or because they think they're about to build the next Facebook.

I'm definitely not in either of those camps, more mid-senior level experience with highly specialised domain knowledge in a completely unrelated field (neuro/QEEG feedback training before, now fintech/insurance)

Conway's Law is king

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